Rain and Baseball And Moth Wings And Andy Dufresne
Today, my son’s Little League practice was rained out. Last Saturday, the big opening day festivities, which were to include bunting (like the red-white-and-blue paper kind, but possibly also the bat-and-ball kind) and barbecued hamburgers and a ceremonial first pitch and the national anthem, were also rained out.
It’s raining now, as I clack on my white and silver keyboard, which is smudged to a point that would make Steve Jobs blanche.
The rain might never stop. Maybe there won’t be a baseball season. This matters to me because I love baseball; I make my living writing about it and I spend a good portion of my free time between February and late June as president of Southern Humboldt Little League, a position I stumbled into ass-over-teakettle three seasons ago. I get an official president’s pin and lots and lots and lots of phone calls.
More than anything, though, this matters to me because my kid loves the sport, down in his bones. He pores over books about the history of the game, cornering me in the kitchen with quizzes about Honus Wagner’s lifetime batting average and the early career of Nap Lajoie. (That’s how old baseball is; it once featured guys named Nap and “Three Finger,” and yep he actually had three fingers.)
We spend hours together in the yard tossing that sphere with its 108 crimson double stitches back and forth. He knows it has 108 double stitches; he read that and remembers it and always will.
He can also pick a ground ball with aplomb and occasionally too much flare. He has a very decent arm for a nine-year-old. He isn’t afraid to take one off the ribs. This pastime, I think, is for him, and he’ll probably play it longer than I did, provided he doesn’t follow my lead and succumb to the siren song of girls and high school drama productions with girls in them.
He wants nothing more than to go to the Hall of Fame with me, and I think I feel the same way, even though my adult mind runs the majesty of Babe Ruth and Willie Mays through the filter of airline tickets and rental cars and time off from the grumble grumble grumble.
At least the Hall of Fame is inside, out of the rain.
I was 10, I’m pretty sure of it. The seats were so orange, the grass so emerald as I turned the corner, out of the concrete passageway that smelled of fried things and lite beer.
My breath, I remember my breath. It caught, literally, in my throat like a thing with sharp edges. This was stuff I’d mostly only conjured while listening to the radio and occasionally glimpsed on TV at a relative’s house.
I wasn’t born in the 1950s, but my parents were hippies who fled the sprawl of Southern California for a little wild patch of rural utopia; feed ’em on peaches and the whole bit. There was no cable. Baseball was static and Hank Greenwald’s play-by-play and the reaches of my imagination.
Now, Candlestick. In all its glory. I didn’t know it was considered an eyesore, and in less than a decade the Giants would abandon it for the tony waterside confines of Phone Company Field.
I just knew this was where Will Clark and Matt Williams and Kirt Manwaring played (hey, I was a catcher). All that green, lo, all that green. It was the crack of the bat and the freshly cut aroma and all the perfect cliches. It was my Come to Baseball moment. I think my dad actually put his hand on my shoulder, if you can believe it. In that moment he might have been played by Tom Hanks.
If I’m guessing, I’ve been to at least 70 Giants games since then, probably more. I’ve never been a season ticket holder; I was too poor when I lived in the Bay Area and now the drive is too long.
It doesn’t matter, though. I could go to 1,000 games, 100,000 and nothing will top that moment. You never forget your first time is a true statement about a lot of stuff. Walking into a baseball cathedral is on the list. Or, at least, it’s on my list.
I don’t need to tell you that 2016 was a crazy year. You were there. So far, 2017 is shaping up as one hell of a sequel. Bigger, crazier, wetter.
Donald Trump was a pretty good high school baseball player, did you know that? The Philadelphia Phillies scouted him, apparently.
I bring that up not to pivot into Trump talk. You can find that if you want it. The point is, baseball’s a thread. It connects things: history, math, the shifting quilt of American culture.
The Chicago Cubs were never supposed to win the World Series. After 100 years, it felt like one of the immutable laws of the universe. Then, in 2016, they did. Probably it didn’t mean anything, other than that Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo and Javier Baez and Jon Lester and Aroldis Chapman are good players.
But, of course, it also meant everything.
What if they hadn’t won? What if the Phillies had signed a young Don Trump? What if that moth hadn’t flapped her damn wings, setting this whole tidal wave in motion?
Every sport is about what-ifs, but none more than baseball. It’s a game of pregnant pauses and sudden bursts of consequential action. Wait…wait…wait…wait…nownownow.
A baseball season is long. One-hundred sixty-two games if you’re following the pros, plus the playoffs. That’s an epic poem wrapped in a soap opera. There are peaks and valleys, lulls and sprints. There is a rhythm, difficult to perceive at times but always pulsing in the background, like the through-line of an elaborate orchestra.
But you can pick out the games, the innings, the pitches that turn the whole messy thing. Only in hindsight, naturally, because that’s always how it works.
Oh, hey. Turns out my kid’s practice isn’t canceled after all. It’s still raining, but apparently not enough.
That’s a tenuous relationship: water and baseball. They dance together, not quite at odds but rarely in harmony.
It rained during Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. There was a delay, during which Jason Heyward — who is being paid $184 million over eight years to be a substandard offensive right fielder — delivered what all in attendance agreed was a rousing, cinematic speech.
It rained during Game 7 of the 2012 National League Championship Series, a game in which the Giants defeated the Cardinals en route to the second of their three even-year titles and Marco Scutaro, diminutive second baseman, looked to the heavens and did his best Andy Dufresne.
I remember thinking, in my living room with adrenaline and a few IPAs swimming in my bloodstream, Well, that’s never going to happen again.
Someday I’ll think that about playing catch with my kid in the yard, too. There will be a final time. A day when we stop — on a high pop fly with me making the ninth-inning, He makes the catch! call followed by the throat applause every boy learns to do — when I throw my arm over his shoulder and we walk in the house, with me being played by Tom Hanks, put our mitts down and never pick them up again, at least not together.
It might be in five years. Maybe ten. But it’s coming, sure as the summer and fall and dead leaves on the ground and another long, cold offseason. Sure as this damn rain.
Of course, I’ll only know it in hindsight, because that’s always how it works.